Frequently Asked Questions

In short, you can think of Rego, the free app, as a trial version of Rego Pro, limited to 10 places, with an in-app upgrade that removes all limits, and unlocks all the features of Rego Pro. For more details.

Whenever a Rego customer ?shares? a place with another Rego user, either as an individual location, or as part of a collection, a unique Rego ?place URL? (link) gets created.

The page shows a map, a telephone number, some photos from the restaurant and some reviews.

You could easily get the impression that we at Rego store all that information in the database that sits behind our web server.

But that’s not how it works. The only thing we store in our database is that unique number you see in the link, i.e. for Lucas’s Pizzeria, we store the number 4c4ca4a574e81b8d4f159106.

When that link is requested from the Rego website, our website is able to determine from that number the place that needs to be shown. Then, we dynamically build the web page on-the-fly by pulling in publicly available data from the Google and Foursquare location databases.

So if you find a page at the Rego website that represents your business, and some displayed information is wrong, you should contact Google and/or Foursquare to have it corrected, and not us.

First, you have to have the Rego app installed on your iPhone. Second, your app must be logged into your Rego account. Finally, when visiting the shared collection link you were sent, in a web browser and logged into your Rego account online, simply click ?Add to Rego?. The next time you open the app, it will see your queued collection, and will import it.

Rego does NOT synchronize your data with iCloud or any other online service, and therefore does not synchronized data between devices. Your data is only stored on the device?i.e. your iPhone or iPad?and for this reason it's important to maintain a backup of your data on Dropbox. Note that you can use the Dropbox backup/restore feature to keep multiple devices in ?pseudo-sync?, but this is a manual process, and requires caution to avoid new data being overwritten.

The?Rego Dashboard?is a website that provides two mechanisms to help you get new places into your Rego:

1. Discovery?You can use the Rego Dashboard to search for new places to add to your Rego. (The Rego Dashboard searches the Foursquare and Google location databases behind the scenes.) When you launch Rego, any places you've recently added from the online Dashboard will immediately get imported. Switching your Rego display into the date listing will show your newly imported Rego places at the top.
2. Sharing?When you share a place or collection in Rego, the recipient will get a Rego Dashboard link, from where they can import the place (or collection) into their own Rego. Whenever you login to the Rego Dashboard, you can see all the collections you're currently sharing. (Only people who know the links to your shared collections, however, can see them.

A somewhat confusing concept is the following: The only data stored in the Rego Dashboard are the lists of geographic coordinates in the collections you have shared. No place data itself is stored at the Rego Dashboard. When you view a ?place? at the Rego Dashboard, the website dynamically builds the page from Google and Facebook data.What

We?d love to release an iPad version, but that would require a synchronization solution to be in place, since you'd expect the data between your iPhone and iPad to stay in sync. Unfortunately, for technical reasons, iCloud isn?t a good match for an app like Rego, and so we?d have to use a third-party synchronization platform, which would require us to charge a subscription fee to use the product, and we just haven?t had enough people indicate willingness to do that.

Since your Rego data is only stored locally on your device, it's very important to maintain a backup of your data in Dropbox. You can read an article in the Guide section of this website for detailed instructions.

If you lose your device, there?s only two ways to restore your Rego data on a new one:

1. iCloud Backup?If you enabled iCloud Backup on your old device, and setup your new one from an iCloud backup, your Rego data (along with all the other data on your old device) should get restored.
2. Restore from Dropbox?If you maintained a Dropbox backup of your Rego data on your old device, you can setup Rego on the new one by performing a Dropbox restore from within the Rego app.

Yes, you can, but you have to be very careful. it's important to remember that the Rego backup and restore feature?replaces data? it?does not synchronize data. When you conduct a backup from one device, the data on Dropbox will?only?contain the data from that device. And when you restore a device from a backup, the data in Rego will exactly match that data from the backup. Any new data on that device not found in the Dropbox backup will be lost.

What this means is that if you use the Dropbox backup & restore feature to keep two devices in sync, you should never modify data on?both devices at the same time.

When attempting to perform a Dropbox Restore, you might see a message indicating that a backup is in progress or was left incomplete:

If you're sure that a backup isn?t in progress on another device, then this message indicates that at some point, you performed a backup that didn't complete.

To recover, you'll need to delete a hidden file called ".lock" that's present in your Dropbox folder. We have a screencast that shows you how to do that in the Backup and Restore article in the Guide section of this website.

Those traveling to locations without data connections (or where a data connection would be expensive) are often interested to know whether Rego can work offline. The answer is that certain features work offline, while others require internet access.

Here?s what you can do with Rego offline:

• View all your pins. Pro tip ? If you've zoomed in to that general location back when you had internet connectivity, there?s a good chance your maps will be cached in the app, and you'll also be able to also see the map behind the pins ? something that would normally required a data connection.
• View the distance of your pins from your current location. This is possible since the iPhone?s GPS works without a data connection.
• Create a new place based on your current location.
• Add photos to your places.

And here?s what you can?t do without an internet connection:

• Create a new place using location search (since that requires access to Foursquare and Apple?s location services)
• Sharing a place via internet

We often to places ourselves without access to an internet connection, and it was precisely for this purpose that we created Rego. So we?ll plan our trips in advance online, using the Rego Dashboard, import those place to Rego in a new collection created just for the trip, and then while traveling, we?ll use Rego to keep track of the places we intended to visit (from our planning), as well as capture places we visit which we hadn?t previously foreseen.

Rego does not store any address data for your places; rather, it only stores geographic coordinates. Whenever you see an address displayed in Rego?whether in the app itself, or at the Rego Dashboard?that data is being dynamically generated from a search of the Apple or Google location address databases, and for this reason, sometimes it's inaccurate.

In the latest version of Rego, however, you can now manually manage & edit the address.

Yes, you can export your Rego data in GPX, KML or a human-readable native Rego format. We have an article that discusses exporting your data in detail in the Guide section of this site.

Currently, Rego supports importing data in three formats:

1. We have a native importer for Foursquare data at the Rego Dashboard.
2. We have a native importer for Pin Drop data at the Rego Dashboard.
3. We support importing of the native Rego data format, i.e. a .rego file.

If you have data from another system that you’d like to import into Rego, the best option is to convert your data from it’s current format, into the native Rego data format. This will likely require some light scripting/programming skills, but the process is straightforward.

To understand the native Rego data format, you would want to inspect the contents of a Rego Dropbox backup, which contains:

1. A JSON file containing all the app’s data, and whose structure can be understood through inspection
2. A folder containing any images referenced in the JSON file

If you ZIP compressed the folder in which Rego performs its Dropbox backup, and changed the extension from .zip to .rego, you would then have a native Rego file for import into the app.

You can import the .rego file into the app by accessing (tapping) on the file on your device, and choosing Rego in the “Open in…” dialog box. You can get the file onto your device for access by any number of means:

1. You can email it to yourself as an attachment. (And then tap the attachment, and do “Open in…” and choose Rego.)
2. You could store the .rego file somewhere in Dropbox, and then access it from the Dropbox app running on your device.

Once you access the file (by tapping it) on your device, and then choosing Rego as the “Open in…” app, Rego will launch an attempt to import your data.

This can happen if your Rego search index gets corrupted, and normally can be fixed by resetting the index, from the Contact & Support?area of the Settings screen [view]. (The settings screen is accessed via the ?gear? icon in the upper left area of the screen where your collections are listed.)

Any place in Rego that was created from a Foursquare search result?i.e. a blue-icon search result in the Rego app, or a place imported from the Rego website?will display a ?Open in Foursquare? link on the place screen in Rego.

For Rego places not associated with Foursquare, you can link them by doing the following:

1. Tap the ?Edit? button in the top right corner, when viewing the place
2. Tap the little map to edit the place’s current location
3. Tap ?Move Pin?
4. On the next screen, you'll find a search field at the top. You can use that to search for the name of the place. Any Foursquare results will have a little blue checkbox to the left in the search results.

If you choose a Foursquare search result on this screen, the pin location might shift slightly as the app will update the place’s current location with Foursquare?s location, but that will establish the link to Foursquare such that the place displays a ?Open in Foursquare? link.